


Like jewellery in the sun

by jetsam



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-17
Updated: 2013-02-17
Packaged: 2017-11-29 15:44:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/688663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jetsam/pseuds/jetsam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Teikou is a journey from which they all emerge changed. (in which Junior High takes on mammoth proportions, but still only lasts three years).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like jewellery in the sun

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by some of the January 2013 prompts from the 31_days challenge

**09\. Alienation produces eccentrics or revolutionaries.**

She is 11 when it dawns on her that Dai-chan is somewhere she can’t follow. She will never again be tall enough or fast enough or strong enough.

Instead, she volunteers as manager, and finds it dull. (The other manager bans her from most tasks). So she visits other schools, and makes notes, that somehow make their way into Akashi-kun’s bag. Before long, the coach doesn’t need to call her name to stay behind: she is included in ‘the Regulars’.

Six months later, she tells Akashi-kun that Dai-chan has a new practice partner, and draws a line through that favour.

* * *

**27\. like jewelry in the sun**

After his second year at Teikou, Akashi sits down to evaluate his performance. It disturbs him when as part of this he discovers himself to consider his players as a sparkly collection that he controls entirely (even though maybe he does).

He picked them for their interesting talents and unpredictability. This takes all the fun out of it.

He spends the next few months investigating options. Despite tentative plans to arrange scholarships for all of them to attend Rakuzan, he decides that is not the optimal option, and sends them out individually.

One practice game later and he is rewarded.

* * *

**19\. you’re crumpled-up nonsense**

There’s a time when Kise thinks it will last forever, when Aomine laughs as he plays keep-away, Momoi curled up on the bench watching. When he can hear Midorima and Akashi talking in the clubroom after the others leave.

When Kurokocchi lurks on court to steal the ball from either one of them.

It strikes him like an icicle through the heart the first time Aomine walks off into the changing rooms without slinging an arm around Kise’s shoulders or messing up his hair.

When Murasakibara goes straight home after practice.

Or when he turns around and Kurokocchi isn’t there.

* * *

**03\. the colors of the day that lie along your arms**

Asked what he misses most about Teikou, Midorima’s mind fills with things that he will never say, that have little to do with basketball.

After training in their third year, he and Akashi sat in the clubroom and played shougi until thrown out by the caretaker. It was blissfully quiet, and in the long gaps between moves Midorima gazed blankly at the speckles of evening sunlight playing on Akashi’s arms, red and gold on pristine white shirt sleeves.

Third year was for the fierce thrill of watching Kise’s chase in the day, and the calm pressure of shougi at night.

* * *

**29\. I named a flower to prove I was alive**

It’s a sad fact that life is boring: school is boring, basketball is boring. Atsushi’s life revolves around these two centres, like orbiting a binary star. In the lulls between the two, he shuts his family out of the kitchen, turns the radio off and bakes. (If Muro-chin comes with, then he waits in the living room and does homework in the meantime). No one minds, because he emerges a short time later with a creation that is perfect and he is only allowed a little of it because, basketball. Just a taste is almost enough to make him smile.

* * *

**31\. It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.**

It is fitting that Kuroko is his last opponent. Akashi, if no one else, remembers a hopeless third string sub with shadowed eyes, who said that it must be lonely to be a regular, with a hundred substitutes chasing you down. Kuroko, who slowly began to move like Akashi, to read the game like Akashi.

This Kuroko moves his team as Akashi moves his, from its heart. It is clear in how they look at him between points, how he is always at the eye of the storm (if you can only see him, but Akashi can and always could).

* * *

**23\. and we’re already too late if we arrive at all**

Somehow, Kuroko thought it would go back to normal after he beat them all. It is only afterwards, when Akashi is looking blankly at him as though he is a stranger, and the others have all wandered off with their new teams, that he realises that perhaps there is no way back.

And when his team (his new team, which has dreamed and lived a dream to its end together) notice him standing off to one side on his own, they pull him into their loud celebrations and he is surprised into a smile and Teikou falls from his mind.

* * *


End file.
